🗳 This Week in Governance - August 18
A weekly resource covering DAO news and governance
📣 What You Need to Know
Governance Activity This Week:
🗳️ 24,255 ballots | 📜 182 proposals | 👥 13,190 voters | 🌐 50 active DAOs
Today We Cover How:
DAOs look to commit to the Ethereum Merge, Treasury diversification remains top of mind, Tornado Cash contagion has most rethinking risk, More airdrops are coming, Uniswap Foundation inches closer, and more
Let’s get into it 👇
🗞️ DAO News in Brief
Aave DAO Proposes Committing to Ethereum POS Chain
As the Ethereum merge approaches, discussions have emerged at a handful of protocols to confirm commitment to the new chain. Ethereum is scheduled to switch from the current Proof-of-Work consensus layer over to the new Proof-of-Stake consensus layer sometime between September 15 & 16. Some Ethereum-based DAOs are doubling down and signaling their commitment to the new POS chain. Aave DAO has introduced a governance proposal where it formalizes the recognition of the Ethereum POS chain as “the canonical” governance of Aave DAO & markets. Look for a vote to go live soon.
Uniswap Foundation Vote Moves On-Chain
The proposal to form the Uniswap Foundation has successfully passed both a temperature and consensus check vote. As a reminder, the proposal would introduce a new centralized entity known as the Uniswap Foundation to help steward the protocol alongside the DAO. UNI holders have signaled strong support for the proposal thus far with a near 100% ‘For’ vote on prior votes. The vote now moves on-chain where it will be live until August 23rd. 40m ‘For’ votes are required for the proposal to pass. This on-chain vote is the last necessary step to form the Uniswap Foundation.
GitcoinDAO Continues Treasury Diversification Efforts
The public goods DAO continues pushing forward its treasury diversification efforts. This time, $10M worth of GTC is being requested from the treasury to be sold to strategic partners. In July, the DAO exchanged $3M worth of GTC as one part of the diversification plan. The current proposal details selling the governance token and diversifying its ownership further. Terms include a 17.5% discount on a 30-day price average, and a 1-year lock up with a linear 1-year unlock thereafter.
MakerDAO Discusses Removing USDC Exposure
Following the sanctions from the U.S. Treasury Department on Tornado Cash, DAOs are rethinking their exposure and risk profiles. The sanction saw Circle, creators of USDC stablecoin, comply with regulators and blacklist a number of wallet addresses. USDC is currently the largest collateral backing DAI, the native stablecoin of MakerDAO. This ban prompted back and forth discussions on the best path forward at the DAO to maintain its decentralization and strengthen its censorship resistance. De-risking USDC exposure has long been a regular discussion at the DAO with recent news events resurfacing it.
📚 Good Reads & Listens
“Designing Governance Tokens” by Alana Levin
“A Political History of DAOs” by Kelsie Nabben
“Startups: Should Yours be a Decentralized Autonomous Organization?” by Spencer Graham
“Cryptoeconomics as a Limitation on Governance” (Mirror) by Nathan Schneider
“To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up” by Divya Siddarth
“The Inefficiency Trap of DAOs” from StableNode
“Zodiac.wiki Begins” from Gnosis Guild
DAO Legal Wrappers a thread by David Kerr
120 ETH Grant Proposal to Tornado.Cash Devs/Contributors from MolochDAO
Squads V3: Native Multisig on Solana
Adjective: Nouns Terminal from Forefront
📜 Highlighted Proposals
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🏀 Krause House: Gitcoin DEI Grant Program Sponsorship and Participation Proposal
This proposal seeks to do three things: First, to gain approval to provide 20k $USDC to Gitcoin as a “matching partner” for the upcoming DEI Grant Stream; second, to get approval for funding to support the submission of one or more grant proposals to that Stream; and third, to demonstrate Krause House’s leadership in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Krause House DAO was
“founded on the vision that team ownership shouldn’t be limited to a handful of billionaires, but rather that all fans of every professional franchise can collectively have real ownership. The intent of this vision is inclusivity across all forms of diversity.”
Potential proposals for a Gitcoin grant include bringing Krause House to the WNBA and creating a Nouns-style community trust in support of women and sport.
✅ 92.47% voting to approve budget + initiative
🎒 Decentraland: Data Backpack
This proposal asks for $240k to develop a data backpack to deploy in Decentraland. The backpack would contain “whatever data” a user needs to “drive a DCL application” while giving the user control over the data shared in each instance. The hope is to support “self-sovereign, decentralized data, and identity,” areas of increasing attention these days. The forum discussion reveals however that the proposal was too hastily put together and needs further vetting.
❌ 99.98% voting no
💬 See the discussion
🏊♂️ PoolTogether: Treasury Assets Management #2
Following on a previous work that focused on stablecoins, this proposal looks to convert most non-stable assets to ETH in order to consolidate. Tokens to be converted to ETH include: AVAX, BADGER, COMP, GAL, SUSHI, TRIBE, and UNI. AAVE and MATIC will be staked.
“Instead of just holding all of the tokens, it was time for the DAO to select those that can have a long term impact and get some yield on them (or hold them).”
✅ 100% voted for
💬 See the discussion
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